Chapter 702: The Fairy Hut in the Dream

Merchants are always extremely prone to exaggeration; if they have one part of something, they will claim three, and they would dare to pass off a single Gold Coin as ten.

Compared to them, the words of a drunkard become credible, even if the drunkard claims they can single-handedly take on a powerful Magic Beast—drunken talk that not even a ghost would believe.

But now, the newly rescued Ms. Feiniya is physically weak, and aside from a glib tongue, there is nothing else dangerous to be wary of. Since her life is in his hands, this lady must weigh her words carefully.

After all, Jier could announce at any moment that she was in collusion with the bandits; pointing to that one thing would be enough to gain the support of the young Refugees to have her executed.

It took quite a while afterward for the five young men under his command to find a way to move the valuable supplies out of the Bandit Shandong. The most troublesome thing was actually the wooden barrel filled with a large amount of Bread; it is unknown how the bandits managed to get it into the Shandong in the first place. His men finally pushed and pulled the barrel back and forth to get the barrel full of dry, hard Bread through the narrowest part of the Shandong.

"Hmm, there are unexpectedly few things, but let it be; at least we didn't come here for nothing." Jier kicked the corpse of the dead Mountain Wolf Bani: "At least we found the culprit behind tonight's attack and killed them."

"It is all thanks to the Knight!"

Someone among the young men flattered him, and Jier accepted it with pride; although it was flattery, it was not wrong—the facts were just so.

"Very well, do not open this box next. I will leave this thing here. Now I am going out to bring people in; you all rest first and guard these supplies."

"Yes, my lord."

Seeing them agree, and seeing them sitting exhausted on the scattered supplies, Jier buried an inconspicuous metal nail into the soil under the open ground.

He then took a small stone ball from his belt; this stone ball was emitting a glowing, ribbon-like light at this moment, and the light was clearly pointing toward the metal nail at his feet.

"It's working, heh, it really is useful." Jier muttered softly, then walked toward the direction the hillside faced.

It is night, and it is drizzling, so it is impossible to distinguish north from south by observing the direction of the mountains or the color of the sky. But Jier clearly knows that the purpose of this bandit lair being built on the ridge is to use the advantage of this high ground to easily observe the situation of the Shanglu that hugs the Forest to the south from the Shulin.

Therefore, one only needs to walk outward along the sloping hillside of the ridge, and one will certainly reach the Shanglu to the south.

Jier did what he said; when he left, he did not go to find the surrendered bandit who had severely injured his foot, leaving the other to hide in the Shulin alone.

Too many people were killed tonight, so one more doesn't matter.

Trying his best to walk in a straight line, Jier finally walked out of the continuous dark Shulin after a while and arrived at the open Shanglu.

Standing in the open area, he looked left and right for a while, and Jier discovered the faint light of a Torch waiting by the side of the Shanglu from the left.

The sparse drizzle could not extinguish the grease-laden lighting Torch, but it could certainly make its light faint. From a distance, the once-bright light was no larger than a Bean, and further away, it was even smaller than an ant.

Jier then walked toward the other group of subordinates waiting.

After getting close, he first heard the loud inquiry of the young subordinate: "Is that Knight Jier?"

He also responded loudly: "It is me."

The clear, loud voice, along with the magical white light emitted from his waist, made the anxiously waiting young men heave a huge sigh of relief: "My lord, why did you come out from this direction? You clearly entered the Forest from here."

Jier explained casually: "You can tell the direction outside, but you can't inside the Shulin; everywhere looks the same. I don't have the bandits' ability to recognize messy marks, so I just judged that I was heading south and tried my best to keep a straight line to rush out of the Shulin."

"My lord, what about the others? Did a battle happen?"

After a pause, Jier said: "One of our own was killed in a sneak attack, but the bandits over there have all been wiped out. I also happened to kill the culprit behind tonight's bandit attack. Phew, it can be considered avenging all the victims."

Only after Jier walked in did he see the young men all sitting on the carriage, their wrists linked together; it did not look like a measure against the cold due to the rain, but rather a way to maintain safety and confidence among each other.

He frowned and asked: "What is this?"

The two young men in the lead leaned over the side of the carriage and carefully examined Jier's appearance; they even leaned in to sniff, and after smelling a burst of blood, they finally let out a big sigh of relief: "It really is the Knight."

"That's great, I thought they came again."

"What's wrong? What happened?"

Jier was confused, so he asked again.

Only then did his subordinates tell him what had happened here before and what strange events had occurred.

It turned out that not long after he took people into the Shulin to find the bandit lair, these young men guarding the carriage heard Jier's own voice calling out from the Shulin; the voice was exactly the same, and it was accompanied by the sounds of fighting.

That voice was calling the young men outside from the darkness deep in the Shulin to enter the Shulin to help him, to assist him in fighting a large number of bandits.

At that time, many young men subconsciously wanted to jump off the carriage to go and support the battle, but it was the calmer one of the two leading young men who identified a major flaw in the words of that strange voice.

"What flaw?"

Jier lifted his Faceplate, revealing his young face filled with a solemn expression.

The young man who saw through whatever it was at the time said: "My lord, if even you cannot defeat the enemy, do we really need to go up and help fight? Before, when fighting on the south side of the open ground, you even told us to retreat and not interfere. At that time, you dealt with dozens of bandits alone, yet you killed them all."

Jier patted his head, making a metallic 'clang' sound: "So that's it, you're right. If I can't deal with the enemy, you wouldn't be of much use going in. If that situation really happens, it's better for you to stay as far away as possible."

He turned his head to look at the Shulin, staring at the pitch-black, gloomy behemoth: "So what happened later?"

"We argued for a while, I persuaded everyone, and told everyone to hold hands and ignore what the voice said. It, whatever it was, made a fuss for a while and then disappeared."

"Very good, I hope you can all always be this careful about those things deep in the Forest. It is best to listen to more of those warning songs and short poems sung in villages everywhere."

Jier clapped his hands: "Now, everyone get off the carriage, hmm, leave five people on the carriage, including the driver. The rest follow me to move all the supplies scavenged from the bandit lair in the Shulin back. Although there isn't much, and this road is not easy to walk."

After all the young men jumped down, a few did not dare to enter the woods, especially after what happened before; Jier let them be, as it wasn't mandatory for anyone to go anyway.

Afterward, Jier whistled to summon Tianxuecao, led it to walk in the middle of the team, held a glowing stone, found the place closest to the bandit lair outside the Shulin, and then led the people in.

There was nothing more to say after that; they neither encountered any weirdness pretending to be people speaking, nor did they encounter any attacks from wild beasts. They just walked to the bandit lair on the ridge deep in the Shulin, and then everyone carried things on their shoulders and in their arms, making several trips to transport the supplies out of the Shulin and load them onto the carriage convoy waiting outside the Shulin.

When the dark, gloomy sky brightened a little, these people were already heading back to the main force.

Ms. Feiniya and her sisters leaned on a carriage full of animal skin bedding, falling asleep to the rhythm of the swaying carriage. And Jier, riding Tianxuecao, followed behind the convoy, chatting with the young men sitting on the carriage while taking off his Glove to stroke a ball of fur in his arms.

Meowing sounds came from his arms; Jier was holding the bald tail of a Jumping Mouse, teasing the little kitten in his arms with a bobbing motion. And this little thing, which was not afraid of people, kept trying to stand up, using its paws to bat and grab at the swinging Jumping Mouse tail.

Its little belly was bulging; when Jier's men found it, the several Jumping Mice in the bandit Shandong had already been eaten by it, leaving only this tail by its mouth.

It seemed it treated this thing as a toy, constantly batting and playing with it on the ground.

Jier therefore also used this thing to tease the little fur ball.

"Lulu, can't catch it, can't catch it. Lulu, can't catch it, can't catch it."

The kitten swiped for a while, then opened its mouth to spit out some clumps of Jumping Mouse fur to the side, and then lazily jumped into the horse hair in front of the Muan and crawled down.

Tianxuecao snorted, not liking other things on its back; Jier used his hand to smooth its mane, and the horse obediently continued to walk.

In order not to let the kitten fall off the horse and run away, Jier took a wooden cat cage found in the bandit Shandong from the Weapon Rack behind him, shooed it twice, and put the kitten into the wooden cat cage.

Regardless of the kitten meowing because it wanted to get out, Jier placed the cat cage on the horse's back.

Ahead, in a bright spot, was the open ground where hundreds of Refugees were gathered.

Everyone in the clearing was safe and sound; many people, even after experiencing brutal slaughter and combat in the first half of the night and being filled with fear, were still sitting together, drowsy, now that dawn was approaching or had already arrived.

Because he had slept for a while earlier, Bata'er Jiaoshi was in good spirits; not only did he not sleep, but he also kept using the temporarily replenished Divine Power of the God of Agriculture to provide treatment—better than nothing—to some young refugees with critical injuries.

"Jier, how are things on your end?"

Seeing the carriage team return, he brought people over at a jog to ask.

Jier pointed to a carriage specifically used for transporting corpses: "We lost one person on our side, but the bandits on the other side are basically all dead. One carriage is the loot, one is the corpses, and one is our own people."

The crazed Weier was currently lying side-by-side with the corpses, crazily and viciously counting the names of his enemies one by one. When the young people were loading the supplies and corpses, they didn't hold back, stuffing the crazy enemy who had killed one of their companions in with the corpses.

This actually gave Bata'er Jiaoshi, who was leading people to handle the corpses, a start: "Isn't there still a living person here? What is going on, loading a person in with the corpses like this."

Jier jumped off his horse, hoisted two charred corpses onto his shoulders, and then said: "An enemy with very good Sword Technique, but his mental state isn't great; he went crazy while fighting. I checked, it's not fake madness, he's truly crazy. Listen to his accent, he doesn't sound like a local, and although he was mixed in with the bandits, he doesn't look like he belongs to their group."

"I asked when I was executing the Bandit Leader; although this man named Weier has a tight mouth, that Shanlang Bani still guessed that this person is a rootless man being hunted. Heh, he even mistook me for the assassin hunting him during the fight."

Jier shook his head and walked away carrying the two corpses, heading to the other side of the dark clearing, where the young refugees who died in the attack and the bandits who attacked everyone had been sorted and placed on the ground separately.

Having so many people die, the sensitive Jier even felt that this patch of ground where the corpses were placed had become somewhat eerie.

It was a feeling that made him feel even more uncomfortable than the Shikeng at the bottom of the bandit lair.

He even faintly felt that if these nearly two hundred corpses that died in the fighting were left alone, in just a few days and nights, some incredible changes would occur to them.

What Jier did not know was that it was currently the early morning of sunrise, and within the Baishi Chengqiang Guanka some distance away, several Priests of the Church of the God of the Dead who had just woken up had received a premonition and were busy packing their gear, preparing to leave the pass and head east according to the premonition.

They had only just woken up when they sensed a gathering of Founengliang that they had not sensed before going to sleep last night.

The scale was not small; even from ten or twenty kilometers away, they had perceived it.

Jier threw the two bandit corpses on his shoulders, which only had their undergarments left, toward the row of bandit corpses placed on the ground, and they landed perfectly side-by-side with the corpse on the very edge.

"Sir, can you help us throw them? Nobody wants to go over there; there are so many corpses, and they are the enemy's, too. Just looking at them makes people lose their appetite."

Jier didn't say a word, took the other bandit corpses, and threw them one by one, barely managing to line them up with the corpses in front.

After dawn, these corpses would all be burned; Jier was now even more certain that these corpses needed to be dealt with as soon as possible.

After settling the corpses of his own people and the enemies, Jier carried two boxes of different materials, one large and one small, to his carriage; he slipped the small box into the carriage and, under the cover of the carriage, sent it into the Jiedian of his dream. The Spirit actually liked the Gold Coins and Silver Coins that Jier had casually dumped onto the Elf Silver Plate on the ground of the Jiedian; it stacked them up and then pushed them all over in one go.

Jier discovered that the Spirit also liked that small metal box; it tinkered with and threw away the lethal mechanism on it (Jier specifically set it aside), then closed the small box. Finding some paint from somewhere, it wrote and drew on the box, dressing this thing up to look like a small house.

It proudly circled the metal box that had turned into a small house a few times, then muttered something, pointed its finger from afar, and with a 'Bang!', the Jinzhuoxiaoxiangzi really turned into a metal small house no more than thirty centimeters tall.

The style of this house was vividly realistic, similar to human houses, and not the houses of ordinary people, but the houses of wealthy people that had been carefully decorated.

However, it was only thirty centimeters tall.

But for a Spirit the size of a palm, it was enough. Jier sat to one side, eating hard Monster Meat Jerky, watching amusedly as the Spirit finished tinkering, opened the small metal door it had transformed, and went inside.

The door didn't close, so Jier could see that the interior of the small house was empty, lacking furniture and items for living.

But this didn't stump the Spirit; it let out a shrill shout, and the Gold Coins and Silver Coins that Jier had just brought and dumped on the ground outside the small metal house sprouted hands and feet, scrambling, laughing, and running to the area around the small metal house.

Some of them squeezed through the big door of the small metal house, while others scattered and stood around the small metal house, as orderly as the Militia who had been training in Kendall for years.

Jier leaned down and leaned in to watch curiously.

He discovered that the furniture in the house soon increased, and it was glittering with gold.

It turned out that the Spirit pointed at a Gold Coin in the house with its hand, and the Gold Coin that had sprouted hands and feet let out an "Ah!" scream, twisting and deforming into a chair.

With another point of its finger, accompanied by the tiny screams of the coins, a table appeared in the house.

The Monster Meat Jerky in Jier's mouth was forgotten to be chewed in his surprise; he stared blankly at this Spirit with its eerie abilities turning his loot coins into a full set of gold furniture used by humans.

It must be mentioned that this Spirit specifically put the Gold Coins in the house as furniture, while outside the house, the Silver Coins that had sprouted hands and feet were scattered in formation around it; it was unknown what the Spirit intended to turn them into.

Before long, the whole house was full of furniture. The Spirit proudly twitched its long whiskers and walked out the door of the metal house with a swaggering gait.

Arriving outside the house, it saw Jier's surprised expression and became even prouder; its two little hands moved left and right, pointing and gesturing at the Silver Coins around it.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—accompanied by a faint flash and the screams of the coins, those coins that were scattered in formation around the small metal house all turned into silver crops and 'tall' ornamental plants.

Thus, beside the Qicai Chitang, on a patch of open ground of Elf Silver Plate, a metal villa-style small house, whose ownership was unknown to be Jier's or the Spirit's, appeared here.

Jier lay on the ground, examining this transformed house with excitement, clicking his tongue in wonder.

And the 'owner' of the house, the Spirit with its whiskers curled up to the sky, summoned the Giant Snail Shell it usually used and parked it on the open ground outside the house door, just like parking a car.

"Hmph!"

It proudly circled its small house a few times, not knowing what it was thinking. Then it hurriedly closed the door of the small house and flew away riding the Giant Snail Shell.

After Jier waited for it to go far away, he leaned his head over, eyes wide, observing this dreamlike metal small house.

"It's so exquisite; I didn't expect this little thing to have such skills. However, these are all my coins; did it just claim them as its own like this? No, I have to think of a way."

Jier used his hand to fiddle with the Metal Small Window on the second floor of the small house, hooked it open with his fingernail, and peered inside.

He discovered that there was also a set of human furniture inside.

"Really nice."

But with a 'crack', Jier was careless and snapped off the other Metal Small Window, and it fell down.

"Oh no! Why is this thing so flimsy!"

Jier panicked, just like a child who had snapped the arms or legs of a friend's toy.